What are zones in cloud infrastructure?

Zones in cloud infrastructure refer to distinct data centers that operate independently within a specific geographic region. These zones are designed to provide redundancy and resilience, ensuring that if one zone experiences an outage or failure, the others can still function and maintain availability. By leveraging multiple zones, organizations can distribute their workloads and enhance their disaster recovery strategies.

Each zone operates with its own power, cooling, and networking resources, allowing for a separation of infrastructure that reduces the risk of simultaneous failures affecting all parts of a system. This design is critical for high availability and allows businesses to architect solutions that can withstand localized issues without impacting overall service delivery.

While geographic regions for data processing (the first choice) are relevant, they are broader and encompass multiple zones. Virtual instances of distributed computing (the third choice) pertain to specific deployments within the cloud, and networks of interconnected servers (the fourth choice) describe infrastructure components rather than the distinct separation and operational independence of data centers. Thus, the distinction of zones being independent data centers is paramount in ensuring robust cloud architectures.